ShRFB reports for the RIVER FEALE CO KERRY

Paddy Dunworth CELTIC ANGLING SERVICES Co Limerick reports on a recent  group visit

Saturday 5th April '08
My older brother Peter, 40 years an angler, normally fishes the Feale for Salmon and fly fishes whenever possible. Peter, as a boy, cut his angling teeth on the Deel at Belville, just below the quiet village of  Kilmeedy. His mentor was his schoolmaster and indeed angling master  Dave Reidy RIP, all this in the halcyon deys of the mid 60's. And so it was that he decided to forsake the Feale and try the more local River Deel for a few hours trouting. April sunshine can be misleading and when on a river it can be decidedly chilly since all rivers are natural wind channels. Kilcoole (Just below Rathkeale)  was his location and he decided to spin with a No. 2 copper Mepps immediately above Kilcoole Bridge. Daydreaming in the first real Spring sunshine, methodically casting and retrieving  the Mepps the last thing he expected to happen.......did!

A spring salmon of 8 or 9lbs. had taken the small mepps with 5lb breaking strain line. He knows it was a salmon because he saw it clearly alongside him, all this before the fish, poorly hooked on the upper lip, made good his escape. He'd played it for 15 minutes and still in shock he could console himself in the knowledge that, under present salmon regulations, he would have had to release the fish.

Some 15 years ago I remember him calling late at night to me with some trout he caught on dry fly in this exact same stretch, and even though the Deel would not have a run of sea-tout as we know it, these, we both agreed, were definitely sea-trout. I myself, whilst gazing over the bridge at Kilcoole in low August water, saw a shoal of a dozen or so fish  resting behind a big boulder , all roughly half to one pound in size.

As the crow flies this would be exactly 4 miles from the tide at Askeaton and it's just possible that some sea-trout run and even spawn on the Deel's lower reaches or side streams thereof.

I've met sea-trout whilst flyfishing a coming tide on the Maigue below Adare, which is just a few miles over the road, the Maigue likewise would not be associated with sea-trout. 
Footnote: Limerick's River Deel today would be considered in the main a brown trout fishery, but in it's pre-drainage days ( Over 40 years ago) it was a good spring and summer salmon fishery. Sadly it's now a pale shadow of its former self, but has recovered well albeit with much reduced water, and is again a good brown trout habitat with dry-fly and nymph giving best results. This scribe can remember when it's upper reaches near Kilmeedy  were as big as the present day stretches above Askeaton.

To my mind, water abstraction has had a much more detrimental effect on our fisheries than the dreaded dredger.

To quote Kingsmill-Moore, 'another vanished Eden'.